Latest News

Politics

Ley's Lies

Australia’s electricity bills are driven mostly by wholesale generation costs and network charges. Rising global gas and coal prices, combined with aging coal plants, have pushed prices up, not the renewable rollout.

By Sarah Ferguson 9 December 2025
World

Framing for war

Laura Tingle’s recent “analysis” on Putin and Europe’s response to the Ukraine conflict leans heavily on emotional language, selective framing and unchallenged political rhetoric. Rather than providing balanced assessment, the piece amplifies fear, marginalises dissenting perspectives within Europe, and omits major realist scholarship that challenges the escalation narrative. The ABC must do better than alarmism dressed up as analysis.

By Andrew Westerman 29 November 2025
Environment

Swallowing the whole pill

Australia’s housing has prioritised resale value and aspiration over climate-appropriate design and community needs. Urban sprawl, weak planning, and speculative property culture have produced an environment where wealth accumulates at the top while renters and first-home buyers struggle. We continue building at pace, but we need far more thoughtful design, policy, and regulation to avoid deepening the crisis.

By Ali 27 November 2025
Health

Why the Epstein files matter

The release of the Epstein Files is not just about embarrassing Trump. It exposes a longstanding “boys’ club” of wealthy, influential men who purchased access to vulnerable girls and relied on Epstein to help them avoid consequences. Beyond the headlines, the files highlight enduring issues around consent, exploitation, and the systemic vulnerability of girls and women in the face of power.

By Andrew Westerman 20 November 2025
Australia

Missing the point and the opportunity

Linton Besser’s recent Media Watch episode successfully dismantled right-wing accusations against the ABC but failed to explain the deeper conceptual differences between doctoring footage, reporting with bias, achieving genuine balance, and avoiding stenography. Without this clarity, audiences risk treating these issues as equivalent when they are anything but.

By Andrew Westerman 18 November 2025
Looking back

Imperial brainwashing

Australia’s first great bloodletting was not a fight for freedom but a misguided imperial invasion of a sovereign nation. Had we understood the real history of the Ottoman world, ANZAC Day might have told a very different story — one where the Turks defended their homeland and the ANZACs died for a British fantasy, not a national cause.

By Andrew Westerman 14 November 2025
Science

Guess what

Xpeng’s new robot walks so smoothly that some viewers insisted a human must be inside. But its lifelike gait isn’t magic — it’s the product of flexible bionic materials, high-degree-of-freedom mechanics, and AI systems that learn the way animals do: through countless refined guesses. As engineers now explore stochastic optimal control — a method that evaluates millions of possibilities in a single sweep — we may be witnessing the beginning of a new engineering paradigm inspired directly by nature.

By Andrew Westerman 13 November 2025
Science

Scissors, Rock, Paper

Scissors–Rock–Paper is more than a child’s game — it is one of the fairest competitive systems ever created. Its non-transitive structure resists manipulation, scales into more complex balanced forms, and even appears in nature as a mechanism that maintains biodiversity.

By Andrew Westerman 11 November 2025
Politics

Nothing like ...

The Zionist lobby relies on a twisted history in an effort to legitimise its genocide.

By Andrew Westerman 9 November 2025
Technology

When a Picture Speaks a Thousand Tokens

As AI systems balloon in size and appetite, it’s time to ask whether words are the problem. A new icon-based approach proposes that meaning could be carried more efficiently through pictographs—compact visual tokens that blend logic, context, and emotion. The result could be smaller, faster, and more human-like models that see meaning rather than read it.

By Andrew Westerman 25 October 2025